Pumpkin Palace -- A Royal Disappointment

It has been awhile since I've last graced these pages with any form of blog. Your long wait is finally over. I wasn't sure what to write about until someone reminded me about the Annual Squishing of the Squash - a.k.a Pumpkin Day. You see, Pumpkin Day is a really new event here at the zoo. It started because people seem to get a kick out of watching the elephants step on pumpkins and squishing them, and when the pumpkins stared getting bigger, we started announcing a time when this event would happen. Not to be left out, the rest of us non-elephant keepers would give pumpkins to our animals on the same day. And so Pumpkin Day was born.

My assignment on that day was to put pumpkins out at certain time in certain exhibits. I knew some of the animals wouldn't care and leave the pumpkins alone, while others would mess around with them. Now Lorrell, our PR person, was all excited because she found us a couple of really big pumpkins and she wanted one of them (weighing more than 100 pounds) to go to our new fisher, Dodger. She and her intern cut two holes in it, one on each side and decorated it like a little house, complete with his name carved over one of the holes.

Pumpkin Day arrived and it was time for Dodger to receive his pumpkin. My intern and I lugged that monstrosity out to the woods. A huge crowd had gathered in anticipation of great things. Once we arrived to the scene with the pumpkin, Dodger the fisher showed no sign of excitement. In fact, he barely opened his eyes to look to see what the commotion was all about. I opened the door to his exhibit just wide enough to fit the pumpkin through and still he was unimpressed. He stayed curled up in the top of the tree as if nothing in the world was going on.

You need it picture it. Here is this beautiful pumpkin house made exclusively for him with about 30 people watching and waiting and he did not care. He did not want to venture out of that tree. Finally, one of the other keepers in the area offered to try enticing him out of his perch with some liver. As she came the back way around his exhibit he seemed to perk up and he eventually came down out of his tree. Hurray!

After checking out the liver treat, Dodger wandered over to the pumpkin palace to check it out. Everybody was holding their breath. What was he going to do? The answer was pretty much nothing. He looked in the pumpkin, I say looked in, because the hole was a little smaller than he was or, he was a little bigger than the hole. Either way, it was a let down because he really did not care. I was just a little bit embarrassed by his lack of enthusiasm, but we all learned that day that you just cannot predict how an animal is going to respond to a new stimuli.

Dodger just seems to prefer his simple boxes and paper bags. Stay tuned 'til next time when I write about the bears and how I saved face with their pumpkins.